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A few months have passed since the controversy was sparked in November of last year when the Spanish national football team agreed to play a friendly game in Equatorial Guinea against the national team. The Guinean government promoted the game and practically treated it like a victory for Equatorial Guinea's diplomacy. Ángel Engonga Obama wrote the following on the website for the Equatorial Guinea Office of Information and Press [es]:

Equatorial Guinea, a small, grand country that is developing, prosperous, strong, and secure, will be recognized around the globe. (…) The result? Guinea has won this game! And by a landslide!!

In contrast to this triumphalist tone, in a letter to the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) [es] the Association for Human Rights asked to “immediately suspend the celebration of the game” to not legitimize “a corrupt and murderous dictatorial regime” that “practices torture and arbitrary detention (…) and imposing a harsh repression upon all of its citizens, civil society organizations, and political parties that are not related to it.”

The Guinean opposition, political parties, and citizens of all stripes also disagreed with the RFEF's decision. Physicist and blogger Principia Marsupia tweeted:

The princess did not know that her husband stole, and the players on the national team do not know that two doors down from the stadium, people are being tortured in Guinea

As if this scandal was not enough, this week Obiang has become almost ubiquitous in the Spanish press and social media for being the only head of state that attended the state funeral for former president Adolfo Suárez, and for having been invited to several events at the delegations of the Instituto Cervantes and the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Brussels.

A few weeks ago, it was revealed that Obiang took advantage of his stay in Brussels to attend the EU-Africa summit and had planned to give two lectures at the Instituto Cervantes and UNED on “Spanish in Africa”, since Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking African country. Moreover, Obiang himself studied law at UNED.

These invitations outraged human rights organizations once again, along with political parties and citizens who flooded social networks with comments and protests. Dr. Juan Ramón Aranzadi Martínez, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at UNED, wrote an open letter to the chancellor of UNED [es] to ask that Obiang's invitation be revoked:

Obiang has become one of the world's richest people by personally appropriating the vast “national” wealth derived from the exploitation of oil, the country that dominates and the population that he suppresses offer all of the international statistics with the highest levels of corruption and the lowest levels of education, health, and living standards for the population (…) no price should be paid to [maintain UNED in Guinea]: no contribution should be made, for example, to the democratic makeup and international legitimization of a corrupt dictator

This way, shamelessly but naively, people think that by treating this murderer – as he is viewed by International Amnesty or Human Rights Watch – well, they can get commercial contracts. In search of oil, timber, and fishing, our king and our governments (past and present) lose their heads over this satrap with no regard for human rights.

Let's see if he has invited himself and does not make them aware. Alright, I just read that the visit comes at the “request of the president himself”: surreal. But come on, someone with half a brain could have told him no.

Obiang's lecture at the Instituto Cervantes. Photo from CULTURAL BLOG on Twitter

On Twitter, the MP for Union, Progress and Democracy (UpyD), Toni Cantó, and journalist Antonio Naranjo shared their opinions on the issues that Obiang discussed at the conference:

Meanwhile, the dictator added more fuel to the fire when, at the end of his lecture at the IC, he was surprised [es] by “the attitude of some nostalgic individuals who reject this meeting for reasons that have nothing to do with the development of the Spanish language in Equatorial Guinea.” And he immediately thereafter had no qualms about putting the king of Spain in a rather compromising position:

How are things so that it is so clear to me that Obiang is telling the truth and the House of Bourbon is lying! #Suborbonation #StructuralFraud

Obiang and his wife at the funeral for former president Suárez. Photo from Información Sensible on Twitter

Obiang's attendance at the state funeral for Adolfo Suárez caused his lecture at UNED to be suspended. His presence at the funeral provoked a new barrage of criticism, compounded by the fact that television networks omitted the dictator's salute to the king and President Rajoy [es], which has been considered an act of censorship. Eloy paterna gila summed up the feelings of many Spaniards with this tweet to end a week of absurdities and inconsistencies: